I’ve noticed that many business clichés have been invading my language. I’ve been trying to be proactive in curbing the habit. Needless to say, it’s not working. So instead of trying to cut back, at the end of the day I’ve decided to push the envelope and give 110% to using as many as possible in this post. My hope is that this moves the needle in creating my own behavioral paradigm shift.

Has it become cliché to be the “industry leader”? As an industry, we (marketing professionals) overuse the term “industry leading” to the point where it has probably become a rubber stamp. But I think it’s acceptable when credible independent sources do in fact recognize you as an industry leader.

To that end, IDC recently did just that. IDC named Cisco as a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unified Communications and Collaboration 2015 Vendor Assessment — for the second time in as many iterations of that report.

It’s important to understand that this kind of analysis is a moving target based on a constantly evolving view of the market. It requires us to open the kimono every two years and peel back the onion. Analysts like Rich Costello look for details on how we are thinking outside of the box. This assessment reviewed our core competencies and strategic next-generation vision. These are analysts who don’t drink the Kool-Aid. Instead, they question how we will take our solution to the next level.

The IDC report recognizes Cisco for being “the worldwide market share leader in enterprise IP telephony solutions, as well as advanced capabilities such as telepresence, Web conferencing services, and enterprise session border control (SBC).”

IDC calls out recent cloud advancements: “Cisco is investing heavily in cloud-native UC applications, starting with building its own Cloud Collaboration platform.” The report also notes the introduction of Cisco Spark for enterprise mobile messaging and Cisco CMR Cloud video conferencing service.

IDC identifies a key strength exactly where we are putting a stake in the ground to create the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid UC solution. “Cisco is well positioned to play a leading role to help customers implement its ‘best of all worlds’ model — housing the workloads for which they are best suited behind the firewall while leveraging the scalability and flexibility of cloud where that makes the most sense.”

I encourage you to read the full IDC report. The bottom line: Cisco Collaboration is breaking down silos. We’re creating a win-win situation for customers looking for best-of-breed solutions that are seamlessly integrated to deliver the perfect storm of game-changing collaboration services across premises and cloud.

If you want to hear more about how Cisco Collaboration can help empower you to take your business to the next level, let’s touch base. We’ll circle back on architecting a robust solution that can be a change-agent for your business.

Gartner just published their report and now is showing MSFT having a good lead over Cisco which is concerning. Granted UC sometimes put more emphasis on productivity software like Office/Exchange/Sharepoint/Dynamics in the UC portfolio which Cisco doesn’t provide and hence MSFT shows higher up but regardless customer’s are looking for an end to end solution across apps/productivity software and not just telephony/video features where of course Cisco shines. My customer’s are going to start asking about this, how is Cisco responding to this?

Its always interesting to see how different people interpret positions from the charts in these analyst reports. I would encourage you and your customers to read the Gartner report and the accompanying UC Critical Capabilities reports for deeper vendor and product details.

Always good to be recognized for quality of products and solutions. Cisco put forth a lot of effort in Unified Communications to overcome the most difficult challenges such as quality of experience for voice and video over an IP network. I expect Cisco to continue moving up and to the right.

LOL. Best blog in a while. I’m going to run it up the flagpole internally and see who salutes. Cisco UC presents so many opportunity to effectively enhance our corporate strategy of delivering value added experiences to our customers while delivering countless opportunities to monetize our assets. I for one can’t wait for the game changing cross-platform integration that the Cisco Hybrid UC solution will bring.

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